Akeel Bilgrami’s paper in the current issue of Social Scientist contains a powerful and comprehensive critique of liberal thought as it has developed from John Locke’s theory of Social Contract to the ‘multi-person prisoners’ dilemma’ underlying the argument regarding the…
The fact that several third world countries, especially in Asia, have experienced remarkably high rates of GDP growth has been a matter of much discussion. There has been talk of a development of ‘multi-polarity’ in the world, of a shift…
My two surprisingly closely related subjects are, firstly, the place of political agency in the face of the claims of historical necessity, and secondly, the possibilities for individual human subjectivity to be socially un-alienated by being theoretically configured in non-individualistic…
Unfreedom and the Indenturing of Labour:A Few Conceptual Aspects We intend to analyse in this paper aspects related to the large-scale movements of indentured labour from colonial India, between the years 1834 to 1920, to plantation islands owned by Britain.…
In the demise of Professor Noboru Karashima, who succumbed to acute leukaemia on 26 November 2015, we lost a historian who brought about a major methodological shift in the historiography of South India. He replaced the impressionistic, speculative generalisations based…
Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Amita Chatterjee (eds.), Marxism: With and Beyond Marx, Routledge, New Delhi, 2014, 279 pages, Rs 850. A rapidly changing world and newly emerging challenges to a progressive social transformation demand a re examination and rethinking of…